Category Archives: POETRY

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While today Percy Bysshe Shelley is generally recognized as one of the shining lights of English poetry, during his own lifetime and for a generation after his death he was not so widely regarded. Most of this lack of appreciation … Continue reading →

Donald Hall is, unfortunately, an under-appreciated poet. While his prose works like LifeWork and Ancient Glittering Eyes represent his greatest strengths as a writer, he remains a marvelous poet. “Names of Horses” is one of my favorite Hall poems. Here Hall remembers the history … Continue reading →

While literary history is filled with American writers becoming British (Henry James, T.S. Eliot) or Continental (Ezra Pound), W.H. Auden represents the reverse. This is one of the things that make him an interesting poet – classic British English becoming … Continue reading →

A volume of my poetry, Montana Poems, is now available in the kindle format from Amazon.com. Three decades in the making and a very low price tag of $2.99. That works out to a tidy little sum of… 10-cents a year! … Continue reading →

Seven Basic Rules for How NOT to Read a Poem 1. DO NOT try to unpack the meaning of a poem Poems are not elaborate, literary puzzles. No matter what some English teachers may have told you over the years, … Continue reading →

At first blush, the marriage between Ovid that most latin of poets and Ted Hughes would seem as unlikely a match as any you could imagine. Not in ability, of course, but in language and temperament. Hughes as a poet … Continue reading →

Reviewing a volume of poetry is much different than reviewing some genre of prose work. It is so difficult that many literary publications have stopped doing poetry reviews all together. The difficulty is usually presented as four-fold. First, to use … Continue reading →

Years ago I remember reading that Yeats would constantly re-write and re-work even his most famous published poems. At the time I read that, it sounded like the most insane thing I had ever heard. Why go to all the … Continue reading →

For a couple of summers in my early 20s, I worked for the United States Forest Service. In the summer of 1983, I worked on a trail crew in the Anaconda Pintler Wilderness in southwestern Montana. At night, long after … Continue reading →

The best quote I know about the fickle nature of affection comes from W.B. Yeats. Quoting his father, who may very well have been quoting Balzac, Yeats wrote: “A man does not love a woman because he thinks her clever … Continue reading →